The present invention relates to electronic storage and sharing of digital images, and more particularly to an improved photosharing architecture.
Over the past several years, photosharing has become widely accepted by photo enthusiasts. Many websites currently exist that allow users to upload digital images to the site for storage on a server and for viewing by others over the Internet. Metadata, which is typically associated with an image or group or images, is typically supported by photosharing sites. One of the most significant inhibitors of photo sharing on the Web today, however, is the lack of privacy available for the images and their associated metadata.
There are currently several available options for sharing images on the web today. One option is for a user or a small group of users to build their own site for sharing, and restrict access to the site through the traditional access control mechanisms available. This can be costly and is beyond the skills of most people, however. Further, there is currently no efficient mechanism that allows a user to search for images across more than one of these xe2x80x9cprivatexe2x80x9d sites.
Another option is for individuals and groups to host their own images on some of the current peer-to-peer networks, such as Yaga(trademark) without incurring great cost or requiring significant technical expertise in setting up and maintaining a web site. Some of these peer-to-peer systems provide limited support for searching using a small set of fixed metadata fields. However, the images discoverable on the current peer-to-peer networks are public as are their metadata, so access is available to all users on the system.
A further option is for users and small user groups to share their images using a traditional web-based photosharing services. These services offer a limited amount of privacy. Through traditional access control mechanisms, a user or group can specify who may see the images and associated metadata. Some of these sites provide search facilities that allow searching on the limited amount of metadata they support. The current photosharing services, however, have possession of both the images and metadata (copies of them, at least). In this sense, the images and metadata are not private. In fact, the user agreements for most of these sites take little responsibility for keeping the images and metadata private, in most cases specify that once the images have been uploaded to the photosharing site, both the images and the metadata become the property of the photosharing site.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system that allows users and groups to share images and restrict access to the images and metadata. Further, the system should allow users to execute searches that span more than one private image storage site in a manner that restricts access to the images and data according to the image owner""s wishes. The present invention addresses such a need.